Editor's note: reproduced with permission of the author. Source:
http://edwardcurtin.com/a-day-of-service-is-a-disservice-to-the-truth-of-mlks-life-death-and-witness/;
also published at:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/martin-luther-kings-death-disappears-down-the-memory-hole-he-was-assassinated-by-a-u-s-government-conspiracy/5568783?print=1.
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A Day of Service is a Disservice to the Truth of
MLK's Life, Death, and Witness
By Edward Curtin
January 14, 2017
[IMAGE: MLK Don't Go OCT 16]
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than
sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love (1963)
As Martin Luther King's birthday is celebrated with a national holiday, his
death day disappears down the memory hole. Across the country -- in response
to the King Holiday and Service Act passed by Congress and signed by Bill
Clinton in 1994 -- people will be encouraged to make the day one of service
(from Latin, servus = slave). Etymological irony aside, such service does not
include King's commitment to protesting a decadent system of racial and
economic injustice or non-violently resisting the warfare state that is the
United States. Government sponsored service is cultural neo-liberalism at its
finest.
The word service is a loaded word. It connotes many things, such as military
service ("Were you ever in the service?"), community service ("She was
sentenced to 30 days of community service."), being of service to others, etc.
It has also become a vogue word over the past 25 years -- e.g. Service
Learning (1995), etc. Its popularity and use arose and expanded in tandem with
the privatization of social life, services, and the expansion of work for
free, such as unpaid internships and articles like this for which this author
receives no remuneration. I see it as part of the privatization and unpaid
volunteer movement engineered by the elites in recent decades. This cult of
the service volunteer is a form of social control and capitalist exploitation
aimed at inducing passivity in an individualized and divided population to
prevent radical social change.
Its use for MLK Day is clear: individuals are encouraged to volunteer for
activities such as tutoring children, painting senior centers, or delivering
meals to the elderly. Clearly these are wonderful deeds when done on
individual initiative and not through government, corporate, and institutional
public relations aimed at concealing an American prophet's radical message and
his brutal assassination.
The American Association of State Colleges and Universities describes it as
follows:
The MLK Day of Service is part of United We Serve, the Presidents national
call to service initiative. It calls for Americans from all walks of life
to work together to provide solutions to our most pressing national
problems. The MLK Day of Service empowers individuals, strengthens
communities, bridges barriers, creates solutions to social problems, and
moves us closer to Dr. King's vision of a `Beloved Community'.
This is sheer nonsense. Such service is a far cry from King's campaign to
transform the institutional structures of American society. It in no way
provides solutions to "our most pressing national problems" or "creates
solutions to social problems." But a day of such individual volunteer service
once a year does make people feel good about themselves. Thus the government,
corporate, and educational institutions strongly encourage it, as if Martin
Luther King were born volunteering at the local food pantry and Oprah Winfrey
were cheering him on.
After all, King was not assassinated because he had spent his heroic life
promoting individual volunteerism. To understand his life and death -- to
celebrate the man -- "it is essential to realize although he is popularly
depicted and perceived as a civil rights leader, he was much more than that. A
non-violent revolutionary, he personified the most powerful force for a long
overdue social, political, and economic reconstruction of the nation." Those
are the words of William Pepper, the King family lawyer, from his
comprehensive and definitive study of the King assassination, The Plot to Kill
King.
In other words, Martin Luther King was a transmitter of a radical non-violent
spiritual and political energy so plenipotent that his very existence was a
threat to an established order based on institutionalized violence, racism,
and economic exploitation. He was a very dangerous man to the U.S. government
and all the institutional and deep state forces armed against him. That is why
they spied on him (and his father and grandfather going back to 1917) and used
dirty tricks to try to destroy him. When he denounced the Vietnam War and
announced his Poor People's Campaign and intent to lead a massive peaceful
encampment of hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C., he set off panic in
the bowels of government spies and their masters. As Stokely Carmichael,
co-chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, said to King in
a conversation secretly recorded by Army Intelligence, "The man don't care you
call ghettos concentration camps, but when you tell him his war machine is
nothing but hired killers, you got trouble."
Revolutionaries are, of course, anathema to the power elites who, with all
their might, resist such rebels' efforts to transform society. If they can't
buy them off, they knock them off. Forty-nine years after King's
assassination, the causes he fought for -- civil rights, the end to U.S. wars
of aggression, and economic justice for all -- remain not only unfulfilled,
but have worsened in so many respects. And King's message has been enervated
by the sly trick of giving him a national holiday and then urging Americans to
make it "a day of service." The vast majority of those who innocently
participate in these activities have no idea who killed King, or why. If they
did, they might pause in their tracks, suspend their "service" activities, and
convene a teach-in on the truth of these matters. William Pepper would be
summoned.
Because MLK repeatedly called the United States the "greatest purveyor of
violence on earth," he was universally condemned by the mass media and
government that later -- once he was long and safely dead and no longer a
threat -- praised him to the heavens. This has continued to the present day of
historical amnesia.
For the government that honors Dr. King with a national holiday killed him.
This is the suppressed truth behind the highly promoted day of service. It is
what you are not supposed to know.
If you are supposed to know anything about his death day as you go about your
day of service, it is the following.
King was assassinated on April 4, 1968 at 6:01 PM as he stood on the balcony
of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was shot in the lower right
side of his face by one rifle bullet that shattered his jaw, damaged his upper
spine, and came to rest below his left shoulder blade. The U. S. government
claimed the assassin was a racist loner named James Earl Ray, a petty
criminal, who had escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary on April 23,
1967. Ray was alleged to have fired the fatal shot from a second-floor
bathroom window of a rooming house above the rear of Jim's Grill across the
street. Running to his rented room, Ray allegedly gathered his belongings,
including the rifle, in a bedspread-wrapped bundle, rushed out the front door
onto the adjoining street, and in a panic dropped the bundle in the doorway of
the Canipe Amusement Company a few doors down. He was then said to have jumped
into his white Mustang and driven to Atlanta where he abandoned the car. From
there he fled to Canada and then England where he was eventually arrested at
Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968 and extradited to the U.S. The state claims
that the money Ray needed to purchase the car and for all his travel was
secured through various robberies and a bank heist. They allege that he was
motivated by racism and that he was a bitter and deranged loner.
However, William Pepper's decades-long investigation not only refutes the
flimsy case against James Earl Ray, but definitively proves that King was
killed by a government conspiracy led by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, Army
Intelligence, and Memphis Police, assisted by southern Mafia figures. He is
right to assert that "we have probably acquired more detailed knowledge about
this political assassination than we have ever had about any previous
historical event." This makes the silence around this case even more shocking.
This shock is accentuated when one is reminded (or told for the first time)
that in 1999 a Memphis jury, after a thirty day trial with over seventy
witnesses, found the U.S. government guilty in the killing of MLK. The King
family had brought the suit and Pepper represented them. They were grateful
that the truth was confirmed, but saddened by the way the findings were buried
once again by a media in cahoots with the government.
The civil trial was the King family's last resort to get a public hearing to
disclose the truth of the assassination. They and Pepper knew, and proved,
that Ray was an innocent pawn, but Ray had died in prison in 1998 after trying
for thirty years to get a trial and prove his innocence (shades of Sirhan
Sirhan, who still languishes in prison seeking a new trial). During all these
years, Ray had maintained that he had been manipulated by a shadowy figure
named Raul, who supplied him with money and his white Mustang and coordinated
all his complicated travels, including having him buy a rifle and come to
Jim's Grill and the boarding house on the day of the assassination to give it
to Raul. The government has always denied Raul existed.
Pepper refutes the government and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, through
multiple witnesses, telephonic and photographic evidence, that Raul existed;
that he was Ray's U.S. intelligence handler, who provided him with money and
instructions from their first meeting in the Neptune Bar in Montreal, where
Ray had fled in 1967 after his prison escape, until the day of the
assassination. It was Raul who instructed Ray to return to the U.S. (an act
that makes no sense for an escaped prisoner who had fled the country), gave
him the money for the white Mustang, helped him attain travel documents, and
moved him around the country like a pawn on a chess board.
Raul, this man who allegedly never "existed," has also been tied by multiple
reliable witnesses to Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald's killer, and therefore to
the JFK assassination. This, too, is history you are not supposed to know.
Pepper not only demolishes the government's self-serving case with a plethora
of evidence, he shows how the mainstream media, academia, and government
flacks have spent years covering up the truth of MLK's murder through lies and
disinformation. Another way they have accomplished this is by convincing a
gullible public that "service" is a substitute for truth. As Douglass
Valentine points out in his important new book, The CIA as Organized Crime,
the symbolic transformation involved in word usage and the archetypal power of
myth creation underlie the vast system of propaganda we are subjected to. And
the implied power of "positive thinking" -- as in "service" -- is a case in
point.
But service without truth is slavery. It is propaganda aimed at convincing
decent people into thinking that they are serving the essence of Martin Luther
King's message while they are obeying their masters, the very government that
murdered this great American hero.
It is time for a slaves' revolt against the mind manipulation served by the
MLK Day of Service.
We need a Martin Luther King Day of Truth.
See Also:
* Extensive live press conference on the Gary Null Show, 6-21-16
simultaneous with release of William Pepper's The Plot to Kill King: The
Truth Behind the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, presenting new
evidence that demands a revision of the history behind the assassination
of Martin Luther King Jr.
* Complete Transcript of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Assassination
Conspiracy Trial, November 15 to December 8, 1999, Memphis, Tennessee
* The Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis by Jim Douglass,
Spring 2000, Probe Magazine, a penetrating exploration and accounting of
the 20th Century's true "trial of the century". September 2012: New links
added to directly reference the 1999 Trial in Memphis transcript.
* King and the Cross, a Reflection by Jim Douglass at the Holy Week Faith
and Resistance Retreat in Washington DC, April 2007.
Martin Luther King's last book, The Trumpet of Conscience, published
after his death, began to help me understand why he was killed. In his
series of lectures delivered over the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
in late 1967, Dr. King envisioned first a national, then a global
nonviolent revolution against corporate wealth and military power. He
wrote:
Nonviolent protest must now mature to a new level to correspond to
heightened black impatience and stiffened white resistance. This
higher level is mass civil disobedience. There must be more than a
statement to the larger society; there must be a force that interrupts
its functioning at some key point ... It must be open and, above all,
conducted by large masses without violence. If the jails are filled to
thwart it, its meaning will become even clearer.
Mass civil disobedience as a new stage of struggle can transmute the
deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force. To
dislocate the functioning of a city without destroying it can be more
effective than a riot because it can be longer-lasting, costly to the
larger society, but not wantonly destructive. Finally, it is a device
of social action that is more difficult for the government to quell by
superior force.
As the U.S. government knew well, King wasn't just talking about
"dislocating the functioning of a city without destroying it." That was
a concrete plan he and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had
for the Poor People's Campaign here in Washington, DC, the following
spring of 1968. They wanted to dislocate the functioning of Washington
until the government took the steps necessary to abolish poverty in this
country.
* The Converging Martyrdom of Malcolm and Martin, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Lecture, Princeton Theological Seminary, by Jim Douglass, 3-29-06.
Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were both executed by what Dr. King
described, at the height of the Vietnam War, as "the greatest purveyor
of violence in the world today -- my own government." While our
government waged a criminal war in Southeast Asia, in which the poor,
largely people of color, of the United States fought the poor of Vietnam
on behalf of a military-industrial complex, our two greatest prophets
resisted that systemic, racist evil with their whole lives. Malcolm and
Martin came to see the entire Cold War as a scam, in which a corporate,
racist power dominated as much of the world as it could by lying about
both itself and its ideological enemy. Our prophets of change, Malcolm
and Martin, were then spied on and undermined by government agencies in
ways that led, step by step, to their murders.
https://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/MLK-Day-Of-Truth.html (hypertext)
https://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/MLK-Day-Of-Truth.txt (text only)
https://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/MLK-Day-Of-Truth.pdf (print ready)